Out of the Woods (10 page)

I told Harriet about Noah Wood Road and asked about the possibilities of getting lost there. Hah, she said, with her short bark of a laugh, people go up and never come out, swallowed up by the confusion of the bridle paths and snowmobile trails and dried-up streambeds that snaked their way around and through the densely forested ridges and the watersheds between them. But Harriet had ridden those woods for years, and knew them well. Slowly, and with many repetitions at my request, she plotted out a simple and, she promised, plainly visible route that should take me in a circular fashion back to my house. It looked simple enough, but Harriet wasn't taking any chances. Call me when you get back, she said. Just so I know you made it.

The path she described took me along the broad rutted back of a dirt road, which if I missed the turnoff, would eventually take me over the hills to the north and deposit me on the other side of Woodstock. We didn't. After about a mile or two we came to an intersection with an unnamed but clearly visible path that cut through boggy marshland before opening up onto a slightly more open landscape of overgrown meadows, broken stone walls, and an occasional apple tree—all that was left of someone's efforts to make a life there. Off to the sides, deer trails led into chapel-like glades; their calm beauty was inviting, but I was too nervous to explore.

It was a longish walk, about two hours, ample time to worry whether I might have misunderstood Harriet and taken a wrong turn. But she had not overestimated my abilities, and eventually we passed a large, high-banked oval pond that was familiar. It belonged to Therese Fullerton, my nearest full-time neighbor. Therese was a quiet, elegant, silver-haired woman, a recent widow, and mother of the reliable Greg. She and I lived nominally on the same street, except for the fact that a stretch of state forest grew between us, with only a footpath providing any continuity to the two parts of the road—a fact I had not registered until I went looking for my house for the first time after I had closed on it. I was standing in the middle of what turned out to be her driveway when she drove by and pointed me in the right direction.

Just after Therese's house, the trail emerged from the woods, checked in briefly with the paved roadway of Long Hill Road before heading back into the state forest and then descending in bumps and jerks until it rounded a slight curve and there, there! was Castle Dismal, gleaming in the sun. I was relieved to see it, glad to be home, too relaxed to worry for once about the walls closing in.

“There is an unaccountable solace that fierce landscapes offer to the soul. They heal, as well as mirror the broken places we find within.” Belden Lane, a Presbyterian minister, was writing of desert and mountains, wild places, where transcendence is etched in emptiness and harsh extremity. There was nothing fierce about the wood that Henry and I took to walking in after that first successful outing; it was a homely place, a scruffy collection of commonplace pines and maples and birches, punctuated with the poignant reminders of modest dreams long forgotten—a mossy cellar hole, an old road that once led to a schoolhouse, interrupted by the flash of a flame-red maple leaf pasted by the wind to a weathered stone. Except during hunting season, I never saw another person while I was walking through them, but still, these were tamed woods, owned and used by others, posted with
NO TRESPASSING
signs and cables strung over private roads, a battered outhouse, even a sign promising pizza up ahead at a popular snowmobile crossing.

 

B
ut the solace was there. Henry and I walked along that same path nearly every day, no matter the weather, and the woods became to me an intimate and yet deeply mysterious place, as changeable and strange and strangely familiar as the course of my own thoughts. We wandered past the fallen trunks of massive trees, stripped of all their leaves, wispy strands of fog caught in their bare blackened branches. Sometimes they looked like fallen warriors and sometimes like prehistoric spiny-backed creatures, and sometimes like galleons resting at the bottom of the sea. The living trees changed as well, light and weather and mood painting them in varying shades of hope and dread. They looked like pawns, or gibbets, like soldiers standing with fixed bayonets, like the twisted creatures of nightmare. Sometimes they bent in arabesque like dancers, sometimes their branches traced the outlines of anguish, and in the wind their leaves trembled, fluttered, fought, exulted, surrendered. I was at home there. I didn't know why and I didn't ask. But there was something powerful there in that shadowy wilderness, and in the quiet watchful witness of its unseen and unknown inhabitants, whose presence was betrayed only by a sudden skittering through the underbrush, or the scolding chittering from a branch too high to see its outraged occupant. In the woods, I, too, was hidden from everything that was scary or confusing or hurtful; in the woods, loneliness was replaced by solitude, and self-doubt gave way to curiosity. I kept to the trails, always, but for the most part that was a comfort, not a constraint. I was free, even from my fears. In the woods there was no one to be, no future to plan. And there were moments of such distracting beauty that my own worries subsided to their proper level of inconsequence.

One morning as I started down my own road toward Noah Wood, I ran into Chip Kendall at the bottom of the hill. I didn't know Chip well, but I liked him: we had first met when he came to the house late one night to let me know that there were search parties out looking for a couple of men lost in the woods, so I shouldn't be worried if I heard unfamiliar noises. That's too bad, I'd said. Were they hiking? The back woods were notorious for their twists and turns—once a horse had gotten lost in the hills and was found a week later on the other side of the ridge fifteen miles away. No, said Chip. Hikers, I can understand. These guys were in a rig. They were—he paused, and a look of infinite disdain had crossed his face—GPSers: a couple of guys in possession of a souped-up rig, a gadget with an automated voice telling them to go down a nonexistent road, and the common sense God gave a moth.

Everyone in the neighborhood had at least one such story, which were always told with a mixture of cheerful contempt and native pride that this was not an area that would ever take the technological bit between its teeth. Harriet had told me a story about a woman who had nearly gone off a cliff while towing a horse van because the GPS told her to take a dirt road into the woods at ten o'clock at night. The trailer was halfway off the ledge before she had realized her mistake.

Chip owned the sugar bush—an eighty-acre stand of maple trees—across the road from Castle Dismal. A little ways down the hill, the wood was threaded with plastic blue tubing that provided a conduit for the sap during the spring sugaring season, which then collected in the huge metal drum at the side of the road. He was from an old Woodstock family and served as head of the volunteer fire department, a man in his early fifties, with a direct gaze, a thatch of black hair and a black mustache, and a manner so laconic he made even the most inveterate Yankee seem loquacious. But he had as well a quiet air of authority that didn't make itself known until called up by circumstance—when the floods came in the wake of Irene a few years later, Chip was everywhere at once, marshaling the crews, mediating with the town, getting the bulldozers where they were needed most. He drove my neighbor Tom a little nuts because he routinely refused to help with the road repair on our fragile bit of thoroughfare. It was Tom's contention that Chip's big sugaring trucks chewed up the bottom of the hill. Chip countered that his trucks had been able to get to where they needed to go long before anyone decided to live there. Chip's argument cost me money, but I liked his unapologetic logic: he took the woods on their own terms; even a road was a bit of yuppie decadence as far as he could see.

Chip and I exchanged hellos that morning as I walked by. You off to see your friend Harriet? he asked. I was. I didn't ask how he knew—up here everyone always seemed to know everything. There's a shortcut, he said, explaining that if I hiked up the ridge through his sugaring trees, I would come out in a meadow on the other side of Noah Wood from Harriet's house. I tried hard to understand his directions—walk into the woods from this landing, head south and take that deer trail, angle a bit west—but my brain froze at the absurdity of ever remembering all this stuff, or recognizing a deer trail if by any stroke of luck I happened to find one. I confessed to being directionally challenged, so he drew me a crude map on the back of an envelope, which I put into a pocket and went on my way. Thanks, I said; I'll have to try that.

Chip went back to work and I continued down the road. I couldn't tell him, because to a man who had lived here all his life it was laughable, but his assumption that I was capable of negotiating the woods with no trails or blaze marks or any indication of what direction to take was like suggesting I fly to Harriet's on my own two wings.

 

S
till Chip's idea lingered, a small brightly colored lure that took up residence in my imagination and made its presence known every time I walked down the road. What if I could do as he suggested? What if I could simply head off into the woods as casually as if I were walking down a city block, and get to where I wanted to go? Or set out to go anywhere in particular and still make it back? What would I have to know, who would I have to be, to manage it? Small, easily ignored but stubbornly present, possibility bloomed by the side of the road.

 

O
ne morning I woke up to a wild roaring. A cold wind was charging through the trees like a pride of lions while ragged clouds raced along overhead and the torn remnants of a fog clung to the lower branches like some half-remembered dream. Henry, wet with rain from a brief dash outside, burrowed under the blanket beneath which I huddled on the sofa until the damp weight of wet dog forced my attention to a practical concern: I was freezing. I dumped the puppy on the floor and set about making a fire in the new woodstove.

In the end what broke the paralysis of those first few months was as simple as that. The days were growing colder and I needed to stay warm, a need that demanded no explanation or justification beyond creature comfort. The woodstove I had bought to replace the efforts of the small and drafty fireplace had been delivered weeks before. It was a Vermont Castings stove, to my mind one of the single most elegant devices ever made, and not just because the company gave their models names like Defiant, Intrepid, and Resolute. It was a rare combination of beauty and ruthless efficiency, if you knew how to work it—I had seen similar models in action in houses all my life, though I had never been the keeper of the flame.

I went looking for the user's manual, which I knew to be somewhere near the stove itself, but which was now buried beneath a tottering pile of books. Finding it wasn't all that helpful: I couldn't even manage to make it through the glossary of terms. I cruised past air-to-fuel ratio before giving up somewhere in the middle of back puffing, baffles, and burn rates.

But the cold is a wonderful teacher. I got a sickly fire going that first morning, but over the days and weeks that followed, the fire got stronger as I became more adept. Gradually the fire became the spine around which the body of a day could organize itself—from the necessity of getting it going first thing in the morning without even the comfort of a cup of tea, to the bundles of kindling to be gathered during the afternoons, to the logs I hauled in from the woodpile at the end of the evening to refresh the supply. I began to learn the stove's rhythms and quirks, how and when to feed it in order to keep the temperature steady and the blaze in check.

A friend of mine once remarked that to live successfully in the country in Vermont involves a conscious step backward, if not into the nineteenth century, then at least to the first half of the twentieth. There are a lot of things that don't work, or work slowly, or don't exist once you are outside the confines of the towns and villages, and you can drive yourself crazy if you don't come to terms with that simple fact. I had no cell service; my Internet, until DSL arrived, was at the mercy of a voracious porcupine and worked infrequently, and the telephone functioned mostly as stage dressing—the nearest telephone pole was a half mile away, and the telephone company, for a bewildering number of reasons involving bureaucratic regulations, state and local requirements, and the rights of individual property owners, had declined to provide service. What communication I did have was due to the fragile length of telephone cable Mr. Riley had laid along the side of the road, where it was subject to backhoes, large trucks, Weedwackers, and small things with sharp teeth. The post office didn't deliver, and the FedEx guy tended to leave packages in a ditch at the bottom of the road. A lot of packages didn't make it at all—for a long time, when visitors entered my address into a search engine, the Internet volunteered the information that no such place as my address existed. As an occasional visitor, I found all of these things charming. As a permanent resident, they made me nuts.

Learning the ways of the little Defiant, sitting like a squat toad in the trim brick fireplace, began to change all that. I began to move with the rhythms of this more demanding, more physical way of living, where light and weather dictated the day's routine. In the mornings, on days that promised sunshine, I would do the laundry. The afternoons yielded earlier and earlier to shadow, and the low light that shot under the clouds struck everything gold before swallowing the house in darkness, save for the one pool of light where I worked or read.

The coming cold meant other challenges: I was not the only one who spent more time indoors. In the evenings, I began to hear a low thunder overhead in the rafters, like a tiny herd of migrating wildebeest. I thought I could live with the invisible hordes, as long as they stayed invisible, but one evening I opened the kitchen cupboard to find one of my coinhabitants looking back. A mouse stood on the shelf, holding a bit of cracker in his paws. He peered at me curiously, as if to ask if there was something he could do for me. I was flummoxed. I thought of mice as timid creatures, instantly put to flight by a human's terrifying immensity. But the mouse didn't move, not even when I yelped and jumped back about a foot and a half. After that we stared at each other for a beat. You might at least have the decency to act scared, I said out loud.